Celebrating Our Little Accomplishments On Children’s Day!

As a part of Mentor India, we have been collaborating with Tarkeybein to use their English curriculum to teach letter recognition along with phonetics and reading to our children.

Apart from delivering the content, we also trained the teacher to be able to keep the momentum going among the kids. This Children’s Day, Akanksha – the founder of Tarkeybein and a very dear friend, was with us at Brindavan Tent School to monitor the progress and observe the class.

What unfolded were moments of pure joy and happiness when the teachers shared their feedback. She blogged about it, and we are very happy to share this little accomplishment with you all! 

Yesterday was Children’s Day and we celebrated it with a lot of happiness at Brindavan Tent School, Bangalore. It is a small three room, government school inside a small community in Doddanekundi. Around forty children attend this school with two teachers.

Tarkeybein got an opportunity to work in this school through our partners, KnowYourStar(KYS) who undertook the responsibility to transform the three rooms into a beautiful school. We started in June and in the baseline assessment, got to know that 67 percent of the children had not yet learnt to read. In our classroom observation, we noticed that the teacher would write on the blackboard and get children to copy. The same routine was followed everyday without the children learning to read on their own.

By June end, KYS Team began implementing Tarkeybein’s content and started with letter recognition. Students loved the alphabet stories and the colorful books. It was amazing to observe the manner in which the children were using the books. The phonic visuals helped them in making connections between the sound and the letter and they didn’t have to wait for the teacher to tell them the sound, they could guess it just by looking the visuals. Through the efforts of KYS team, both the children and teacher got introduced to a new language learning experience which was not based on rote.

When the children moved from recognition to reading stage, their teacher moved from observation to implementation phase. This time, we provided the training directly to her and her acceptance was fabulous. She grasped the segmentation and blending exercises with ease.

When we went back to the classroom in three weeks, what we saw, gave us tremendous happiness. The children had learnt to identify sounds in a word. It didn’t stop there. The teacher recognized the importance of Teaching for Understanding. She explained that now when she wrote anything on the blackboard, she first introduced the sounds and children grasped it better. Even while teaching number names, she explained the sounds in Six and saw that children were able to understand the spelling rather than rote learning it. She had imbibed the process of building phonemic awareness in children in less than a month.

And there is still more good news, three girls, Anushka, Rupa and Chandni, who were irregular before, have now started coming to school daily. The teacher attributed this to her teaching of English and the parents seeing value in that. This made us realize that the smallest of things can have an impact when you listen to the needs of your user. 

This was the story of our beautiful Children’s Day. It gave us hope and faith to keep walking. It also strengthened our belief that Tarkeybein needs to create experiences for teachers which shift them from rote-learning to teaching with understanding.

Thank you Akanksha, and the entire team of Tarkeybein, for developing such an amazing curriculum, which not only helps kids learn English by understanding, but empowers the teachers to confidently deliver it! You guys are awesome and we are eternally grateful for this collaboration. 🙂